History Through the Eyes of the Anonymous: Summer Palace (2006)
Written: Jan 19 '08 (Updated Jan 20 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Acting (especially Lei Hao), photography, editing, drama, depth of main character Yu Hong.
Cons: Unnecessary length, choppiness, much of the music
The Bottom Line: Poetic, romantic, erotic, realistic, tempestuous, ambitious: Summer Palace is a satisfying meal for the art house junkies, if somewhat bloated and not quite fully cooked.
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| trust12345's Full Review: Summer Palace |
It is all but impossible to imagine the current censorship board of Chinese film approving the film Yihe Yuan (2006), known in the West as Summer Palace. It has more steamy sex scenes than any art film this side of the porno industry, and a storyline that courses right through the still-forbidden topic of the Tiananmen Square uprisings in 1989, and the government's massacre of pro-democracy students. And none too surprisingly, Summer Palace is banned in China, and its director, Ye Lou, best known for Suzhou River (2000), forbidden to produce a film in the Mainland for five years. Ridiculously, the Chinese censorship board would have us believe they denied the film because of procedural and technical matters. Right. The film was shown in Cannes, though did not pick up any awards at the esteemed festival; merely being selected, however, is a great honor.
The story of Summer Palace takes us from 1988 until around 2003, with titles suggesting the time and place, and a narrator and central character, Yu Hong, frequently reading from her diary, casting the film as a long, bittersweet remembrance. (I was unable thus far to determine how much, if at all, the film is based on actual persons.) Yu Hong, a poor village girl from the North of China, is accepted into Beijing University. Passionate, beautiful and headstrong, men constantly flock to her, but it is one fellow student, Zhou Wei, who captures her heart, as it were, forever. When the Tiananmen Square uprisings and crack down ensue, the chaos and violence is almost a distant backdrop to the internal chaos of Yu Hong's erotic life and of her tempestuous relationship with Zhou Wei. As with innumerable art films from Asia in the last ten years, Summer Palace emphasizes the longing for unreachable love and the smoldering fires of desire; if that sounds melodramatic, at least in this instance, it is.
The greatest strengths of the film are its poetic atmosphere (conjured through deft, subtle editing, the quixotic narration, close ups, and roving camerawork) and its leads Xiaodong Guo as Zhou Wei, and above all, newcomer Lei Hao as Yu Hong. Yu Hong is a deeply wrought character of extreme romantic longing and of inner disquietude and melancholy, and Lei Hao gives a scintillating, complex performance that is one of the best in recent memory. If awards for artistic merit offered arbitrarily among the competition of a given year meant anything, I believe she'd be most deserving of all the top honors. Lei Hao's emotional honesty is as naked and exposed as her body, which is to say, total and uncompromising. The abundant sex scenes (with multiple partners) are absolutely central to her emotional frame of mind, and thus are devoid of pornographic (or gratuitous) content. It doesn't hurt that these scenes are filmed beautifully, and that she (and her main partner) are very easy on the eye. (Just for what it's worth, this is the first Chinese Mainland film to display full frontal nudity of a man and woman; something of a milestone, then.)
On the basis of the aforementioned, I recommend the film, especially to those who enjoy the art house fare. However, there are some major drawbacks. The storytelling is erratic, with awkward jumps in time that leap over years in the midst of a montage, almost arbitrarily. The Tiananmen Square protests and aftermath (shown to some extent in archival footage) are treated awfully tangentially, while the central characters who get swept up in the events speak nary a word of politics, one way or the other. The original score by Iranian composer Peyman Yazdanian is overused, with some terribly cheesy elements, though some of the more spare as well as romantic themes do serve the film well at times. Most damningly of all, however, is the unnecessary length (2 hours and 20 minutes), much of it fattened up by longing gazes and pointless asides. Trimming 30 or 40 minutes in the right places could have made this a much stronger film.
It's neither here nor there, but you will seldom see as many scenes of smoking in a film; Summer Palace (so named for the locale where the central couple sometimes perambulate) is a veritable advertisement for cigarettes, the lead characters ever swimming in clouds of each other's smoke. If I weren't allergic (and if I didn't find the habit repulsive), I'd be fairly tempted to join the party. If you're trying to quit, this film will test your resolve.
3.7 stars rounded up: recommended with caveats
Addendum: My wife attended the same university (albeit a decade later, and for medical school), and so has a far better index of what is (or is not) "true to life" about the film. She remarked on the accuracy of the heavily cramped students' living quarters that we see throughout the first half of the film. She felt the director vividly captured the mood of life in Beijing. Though she expressed certain reservations, she felt this is one of the best films to come out of Chinese Mainland in years.
Recommended:
Yes
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Member: John Stone
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